No Country for Old Men was the big winner at
Monday's Critics' Choice Awards, winning Best Picture, Best
Director (for brothers Joel and Ethan Coen), and Best
Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.
No Country for Old Men was the big winner at
Monday's Critics' Choice Awards, winning Best Picture, Best
Director (for brothers Joel and Ethan Coen), and Best
Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.
Bardem accepted
for the absent Coens, saying, ''I'm the third brother,
the Spanish one.''
Awards came in
pairs for three other films: Hairspray, Juno, and
There Will Be Blood.
The cast of
Hairspray was named Best Acting Ensemble, and
its breakout star, Nikki Blonsky, won Best Young Actress.
The 19-year-old
thanked ''my mommy who's sitting here crying and my other
mommy who's at home, John Travolta.'' Travolta famously
cross-dressed to play Edna Turnblad.
The
teen-pregnancy film Juno collected trophies for
Best Comedy and for screenwriter Diablo Cody.
There Will Be Blood earned the Best Actor honor
for star Daniel Day-Lewis, and composer Jonny Greenwood of
Radiohead won Best Composer for his haunting score of the
film.
The Writers Guild
of America strike, which began November 5, has
effectively shut down Hollywood and cast a pall over
Tinseltown's awards season. But the Critics' Choice
Awards, presented by the Broadcast Film Critics
Association at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and
broadcast live on VH1, wasn't covered by guild
contracts.
Julie Christie
won Best Actress for Away From Her, but she
wasn't on hand to accept her prize. Also absent was Best
Young Actor winner Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada, star of
The Kite Runner, and Best Supporting Actress
winner Amy Ryan, who costarred opposite Casey Affleck in
Gone Baby Gone.
Glen Hansard and
Marketa Irglova, who won Best Song for their work in
Once, also skipped the ceremony.
The cooking
comedy Ratatouille won Best Animated Film.
Writer-director Brad Bird said before the ceremony that
winning wasn't just for him.
''I look at it as
a win for all the people who worked on the film. It was
a film that was long in gestation,'' he said. ''Animation is
coming more and more to the forefront, and it's great
because people see that it's not an obscure art form;
it's something accessible and fun.''
Enchanted won Best Family Film, Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee was Best Made-for-TV movie, and
Sicko was Best Documentary Feature.
The critics chose
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly as the
Best Foreign Film. Director Julian Schnabel was
humbled by his win. Asked backstage how he felt, Schnabel
said, ''A little drunk and pleasantly surprised.''
George Clooney, a
nominee for his starring turn in Michael Clayton,
presented the inaugural Joel Siegel Award to Don
Cheadle for his humanitarian work.
Before
introducing his friend, Clooney noted the impact on the
city of the Hollywood writers' strike.
''This is a
one-industry town, and when a strike happens it's not just
writers or actors, it's restaurants and hotels and
agencies,'' he said. ''And our hope is that all of the
players involved will lock themselves in a room and
not come out until they finish.''
Cheadle also
acknowledged the strike, saying it kept him from writing an
acceptance speech.
Into the Wild, written and directed by Sean
Penn, had a leading seven nominations but didn't win any
awards.
The Broadcast
Film Critics Association, which represents more than 200
TV, radio, and online critics from the United States and
Canada, founded the Critics' Choice Awards in 1995.
(AP)
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